One of the main reasons the 820 processor has been so successful in so many designs is because it introduced multiple new technologies, all tightly integrated and power optimized, designed to bring user experience innovation to the mobile industry.

Building on the technology leadership introduced with the Snapdragon 820 platform, the 821 is engineered to deliver faster speed, improved power savings, and greater application performance, ensuring 821 powered devices keep pace with the growing performance demands of users to deliver the unmatched user experiences the Snapdragon 800 tier is known for.

The Snapdragon 821 is engineered to deliver a 10% performance increase over the 820 with the Qualcomm Kryo quad-core CPU, reaching speeds up to 2.4GHz. Why would you introduce something to replace what many consider the best mobile processor available today? Simple, we’re not. Rather than replace the Snapdragon 820, the 821 is designed to complement and extend the competitive strengths of our Snapdragon 800 lineup.

The Snapdragon 820 introduced a number of highly optimized and custom-designed core technologies and established an early and clear leadership position in premium tier mobile computing. Consider, for example, the X12 LTE modem. It is in a class of its own, designed to support download speeds up- to 600 Mbps, LTE uploads up-to 3x as fast with Snapdragon Upload+, vastly improved call quality and reliability with Ultra HD Voice, all tightly integrated to deliver wide area connectivity to Snapdragon 820 to devices worldwide.

The Snapdragon 820 currently powers some of the most advanced, feature rich smartphones today, including the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, Xiaomi Mi5, LG G5, HTC 10, LeEco LeMax Pro and LeMax 2, and Sony Xperia X Performance. And because the Snapdragon 820 helped improve the user experience for mobile imaging, virtual reality, battery life, and connectivity speed and reliability, all the updates we’ve included in Snapdragon 821 will help keep devices powered by Snapdragon 800 premium-tier processors at the top of people’s shopping lists into the foreseeable future.

We’re excited to tell you more about just how the Snapdragon 821 will help set a new bar for smartphones, tablets, mobile VR head mounted displays and other new devices. You can expect commercial devices powered by the 821 in the second half of 2016. Stay tuned for more information on the Snapdragon 821 coming soon.